Thank you for the heads up Taha and Federico. I'm not entirely sure redirect will be a big factor in what I'm playing with but I'll definitely keep an eye out for it. From what I gather, there is no simple way to check if there is a redirect page pointing to my page of interest?
I have about 400k pages I'm looking at across multiple editions so Pageviews_API might not be enough :) I'll just try my hand at implementing a PAGENAMEE encoding in Python unless there's some library out there that I'm missing.
Best,
B